The rest of the country really has no idea.

I wouldn’t have had, either, if not for being naturally reckless on occasion. This last weekend, however, I had guides and 4WDs to smooth (?) the way. What I did was hook up with an informal geology field trip, and we went back where hardly anyone ever goes. Total, absolute heaven, on some of the worst roads I’ve ever been on in my life. How we got through without a smashed crankcase or a blowout is beyond me. But where that gets you is astonishing.

Powerful deep energy

It really is wild. It goes for miles and miles, until the distance doesn’t count, because everywhere I go, I’m Here. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. It’s a huge spiritual kick. When I get far enough away from “civilization” that I feel that deep, serious fear, it opens up the circuits, concentrates the attention. Then I pass through to some enormous, unspoken relevance that’s like cool water to a thirsting soul. Inexpressible awe and gratitude. Comfort. All is One, indivisible and alive.

Coming home from something like that is always jarring, no matter how loving the domestic scene. Until I see the wildness again, that is, right in front of me, in the flashing of her moods and in her eyes.

Be not afraid, the light is growing.

My sweetie has embraced “process,” and so, remarkably, have I. This is big. She has a studio now where she can place her baby grand as soon as Mayflower gets its act together and trucks it down here from Dubuque. There’s even a bathroom of sorts, with an actual toilet. When she steps out the door, she can see for 90 miles or more. But all her music and books are still packed in boxes, a terrible frustration for a scholar like herself. What’s more, our actual housing situation remains in limbo. With all the work involved in outfitting the studio, it’s likely to remain so through the end of the year. Everything’s a process, nothing ever finished — the actual way of the world, of course, now proudly loved for what it is. There was a time when nothing would do but closets and sidewalks, neither of which is to be had in our rented piece of “old Taos.” (No overhead lights, wall switches, or flat floors, either.) We are, eventually, “so out of here,” as she said the other day, but only as it flows along with all the rest.

And I’ve become a 63-year-old blank slate, each day completely open in a personal sense. Oh, I have my tasks and stable-cleaning obligations to myself, but what I’ll actually do from here on out is up for grabs. Nothing to prove, nothing to atone for. I used to have “issues” with my wife chattering on about things I thought I didn’t are about, and now I hang on every word and gesture. Every second is a precious eternity.

When my cell phone rings, if it isn’t her, I may not answer.

This is the extemporaneous speech Obama gave to union members in Milwaukee the other day. I first saw it over at Balloon Juice, where John C. said everybody had to watch. He scares me, so I did, but this is something really good:

It’s raining manna from the sky right now. Go git some!

No, nobody died, at least not in the way you think, but the current focus of the chronicles are over with this installment. What a ride.

Most of the posts in this series are extremely emotional, somewhat overblown, and very dark. They’re also at least five times too long: if I could edit it down to 20% of what’s there now, we’d all be better off. But the literary flaws mirror the stress of these last few weeks quite clearly, reminding me of the whirlpool that sucked me under and still grabs me in the heart. (Biology is compelling, even in a lie.) There haven’t been many comments, though, probably most people have an intuitive appreciation of sorts, and whether from embarrassment or respect, one feels reluctant to speak up. That’s fine. What would I have to say to a friend who’d just lost an arm in a car crash, for example? The difference, however, is that the Helen Chronicles are revelatory for me, not crippling . The disability comes before, not after.

Without more exposition, one might make the mistake of thinking that the recent period represents a sudden personality change, the kind so many face when aging parents disintegrate before their eyes. There’s that, all right (the decline into an unsustainable state), but this wasn’t really sudden. Helen was always fragile, irrational, and deadly mean when hurting. In between, when growing up, I thought I had a mother and that everyone’s was like her: love ‘em when they’re good and leave ‘em when they’re bad. Affection that had to be earned, in other words. Think about that. What would be left of the emotion by the time it turned up as a temporary ration? Love reduced to doggie biscuits. And if that’s what you have, as lacking as they are, you still learn what to do to get the next one, because you’re always hungry.

So it was in the beginning and then got worse. Progressively, over time, a way of “dealing with it” grew alongside the rising emotional violence. This could be described as learning to expect the worst on any given visit, for example — only, why then go at all? Consciously, because that’s what good sons do, look after their dear old mothers, unconsciously, because I had to be good to get my biscuit, get that mother-love stamped in little Johnny’s passport. You can’t say that I was in control at all, really, continually revisiting the scene of the crime. We’re biologically hard-wired to love our mothers anyway: whatever the dance was, it seemed to fit the bill.

And then there was the money, I realize. Ultimately, always, the money, the great big bag of doggie biscuits in the sky. If she mentioned it once, she brought it up a thousand times: what would happen when she died, who would get what, who wouldn’t. On every single visit, every phone call. If I wouldn’t discuss it and pledge allegiance to the creed, there’d be an ugly, crazy-making breakdown in the next ten minutes. On every single visit for over 30 years, at least, though it wasn’t always due to my heartless reluctance to wallow in the “family” muck of greed and fear and counting pennies. A minor therapeutic sarcasm could grow in Helen’s mind into a slight, a slur, a vicious ingratitude for all she’d ever done. Soon I’d be “just like your father” and there’d be nowhere to escape: she’d follow me or my wife from room to room, spewing toxins. You had to take part in the combat or become a mortal enemy. It was for her or against her, or else you ran away and stayed away until the guilt built up enough to make you go back and renew your membership.

Madness upon madness, cranking, grinding, tearing, mindless pain and horror, always though within the “family,” because we were one, sort of, and this was just what “families” did, except they didn’t. Not all of them. And you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to accept this larger, non-approved, alternative truth. (Just ask my wife.) I know now that a mother’s unconditional love reflects a child’s soul back to him or her, and that is how we know we have one. Absent that, it takes whatever passes for divine intervention. Grace, luck, mystery… I don’t know how my siblings and I are still alive, considering.

But the nightmare I found in Tucson finally blew the doors off: that buggy is dead in the middle of the road. I know this, but I still can’t adequately put my reaction into words. This is monumental. Everything I’ve ever done, or dreamed, or tried to do, was corrupted by the greatest lie that ever was. Fundamentally, I never really had a mother. I never got my ticket punched, not for over 60 years! My God, chilluns. My God, my God.

This realization is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m still substantially in shock, but I also feel a kind of liberation, like I’ve been rescued after having been raised by aliens on another planet. So I’m a human being, after all — who knew?! — and I can do what humans do and follow my heart. I CAN DO WHAT I WANT! How can this be? Because I DO have a mother, and I finally know I have a soul.

After growing slowly in my awareness all along, it’s here now in the nick of time. I’m talking about the Big Momma, chilluns, the all-enfolding love of all Creation. MOTHER NATURE, Mother Earth, the stuff my body’s made of, the thing we can’t define or do without, the ultimate redemption: Goddess loves me, this I know, for my tears, they tell me so. (Put it any way you want.) I have the rest of my life, be it long or short, to do things differently and start again. Stunning and disorienting. Life-altering. Absolutely, totally, completely, mind-numbingly huge.

I feel like I need to go climb a mountain, curl up under a ponderosa pine, cry for a week, then sleep for a thousand years…

I watched the last few hours of the Democratic convention, and of course I heard Obama’s amazing speech. It wasn’t the words — most of what he said was very down-to-earth — but his courage and directness. The intensity of spirit that he showed, the empathy, the honesty — my God, the INTELLIGENCE! I’ve been saying for months that this isn’t about Obama but has to do with something bigger, and damned if he didn’t say just that tonight: “This isn’t about me, it’s about you…”

He also managed to obliterate McCain without attacking his character. (In fact, he praised it.) I haven’t ever witnessed such a deadly serious dismemberment delivered with as much authority. This is outstanding politics. The last few weeks had to be a conscious set-up, too: Obama won’t attack, etc. etc. Hah! We are so damned lucky. The country is so damned lucky. This is going to be a glorious emotional rush with MUSCLE behind it.

Get ready to feel good. Not because we’re “winning,” but because of something else.

Morning word: Adult Protective Services in Tucson spent two hours talking to Helen, then upset my sister in Los Angeles by calling about all the same bullshit: Helen told them she has five kids, but no one will help her. No one will help her? Oh, please. I expect they’ll be calling me too. The reality is that no one can help her…

It’s a crazy-making vortex. There’s no way to “win,” it can’t be defeated. Anyone who gets involved risks serious damage. The old woman is choosing to die by going straight out of her mind. That’s why she moved into a living grave. I could get her into the fanciest nursing home in Tucson or Austin if she’d only agree, but no hope there, apparently. She’s also practiced her litany of imagined offenses against her so many times that she can tell it to strangers and sound halfway sane.

Astonishing, isn’t it?

When last I typed that title, I told how I’d decided to let Helen do whatever she wanted…

The old woman wouldn’t budge and wasn’t so far gone she couldn’t fool a social worker. Never mind “the voices” and losing $2,500 in cash. Never mind paying too much for an awful trailer she didn’t need with 50 grand she needed to keep. Never mind the permanent reduced breathing capacity and a history of “minor” strokes. Never mind that she’d moved from a beautiful home with room for live-in help to a pathetic dark hole where nothing would ever work. Never mind that she was living out her own worst nightmare but had no self-awareness. Never mind, never mind. She could live on stale fig newtons if she wanted, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t believe how far gone she was, and that her doctors wouldn’t help me.

It seems so bloody obvious. She can hardly walk, she wets the bed, her dentures are worn and make her look like hell. SHE HEARS VOICES. SHE GETS BATSHIT CRAZY MEAN WITH RAZOR BLADES. She thinks she has things fixed up “just the way I want them” when someone else’s pictures are still hanging on the wall, and she can’t take a real bath ’cause the tub is way too small.

If she wouldn’t accept help, though, there was no way for her to have it. I was letting go, and in this found a measure of compassion. Hopeless or not, maybe her wish to keep her “independence” rated more respect. Giving it up had to be a horrendous prospect, even if her material circumstances would be much improved. Maybe she had a right to go to hell in front of everyone and die unhappy. She’d be unhappy (or much worse), no matter what. Maybe there was something deeper going on that I was meant to watch and learn from.

At any rate, I finally went to see her. Her house was locked, and at first she wouldn’t let me in. I could see her sitting on the sofa while I knocked on the glass, and after a minute or two, she relented and let me in through the kitchen door. I got her a glass of water and sat down next to her on the dead man’s sofa.

“WHY DID YOU COME?” she asked, loudly and bitterly (the high point of the visit).

I told her I was deeply sorry for raising my voice against her the day before and trying to make her go into a nursing home. I told her she could stay in her trailer as long as she wanted, but that all five of her children believed she should be somewhere where she’d be looked after. I told her how worried we were and how much we cared. I told her she had taught me a lot about growing old,and I meant it.

“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THAT MUSHY STUFF!” she shouted, livid with rage.

Amazingly, I was still detached and told her how my brother and sister in Austin had found a couple of very nice nursing homes she might like. I said I wanted her to come to Taos, but I knew she wouldn’t like the cold, and that we all thought it best if she would move to Austin.

“WHY WOULD I GO WHERE THERE’S NO ONE TO VISIT ME?”

Patiently, I pointed out my two siblings and their spouses in Austin, enough that someone would be able to visit almost every day.

“I DON’T WANT THAT!”

She then proceeded to excoriate and damn every one of my siblings. She said we’d never come to visit her in Tucson (not true), that no one cared, especially me, and that I never gave a damn about my father, either. I was witnessing a breathtakingly alien torrent of anger and hatred. There was nothing maternal at all to this entity, whoever or whatever it was, inhabiting the almost 87-year-old body of my mother. The dark wild thing was now off my shoulders and fully manifested in her. I felt released but in great danger and suddenly rose to leave. “I’m going back to Taos tomorrow, Mother,” I said.

“GOOD!” she snapped. I bent down to kiss her on the forehead, then opened the door. As I walked down the steps, she shouted after me, “I DON’T NEED YOU, JOHNNY!”

I drove back to her old home where I was staying, literally shaking from the impact of what had just happened. My solar plexus was throbbing. I called my wife and paced for two hours until I calmed down. In 63 years of relating to Helen, I’d never experienced anything this stark or clearly dangerous, but I also felt a hint of something unmistakably good. After all, my conscience was finally clear…

The elation I’ve felt since is not unlike the newfound appreciation for life that welled up some days after watching my father die some 20 years ago. It washed over me at the time like a healing flood. The energy is similar now, only deeper, and this involves release.

I couldn’t believe how beautiful the stupid rutted dirt road looked when I finally hit the last turn before our house. I couldn’t believe how stunning my wife was or how perfect the air felt. I couldn’t believe how happy I was to be home.

My honey says I’m different. I’m still disoriented and exhausted, but basically good. I may be standing straighter, and I’ll bet I’ve lost a little weight.

Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.

How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to me. I say “mildly” because I always figured it was possible to live like that, but the actualization seemed to elude me. Probably I was too fucked up myself, not to put too fine a point on it. If that’s the case, then I must have evolved in recent years, or else I just hit the jackpot. Call it grace and good luck.

But these two fine companions, both outstanding musicians, having followed my recent travails as best they could from my raging emails, wanted to give me a chance to vent. I was invited to a night of therapeutic drinking and gentlemanly pursuits — well, mostly drinking — and vent I did. First I sang them a song I’d written yesterday afternoon, one that you’ll be able to hear soon. [See below*] In the course of the evening, we finished a fifth of Cuervo 1800 and I got dog hair all over my clothes. That would be from Popeye, the resident terrier (?). Much hilarity ensued after the venting, and I even got fed. I also heard an earful about another mother, and it shook me to the bone.

(How did we ever survive???)

When I got back to the run-down adobe on the side of the hill and sat down at my MacBook to catch up on my emails before crawling into bed, there was a message from my brother Rob. It was a beautiful message in many ways and ended with the declaration that the next time, we would both go to Tucson. That remains to be seen, of course, since I’ve said I won’t go back unless Helen is dead or in protective custody, but if she’s really out of it (say, crawling around in circles on the floor and drooling), then a guardianship hearing might prove productive. Time will tell.

What hit me hardest in the email, however, were a few sentences summarizing what life had been like at home in Houston during my younger siblings’ high school years, a period I knew little about. At that time I was at UT-Austin learning where to put it and getting my hippie credentials, so I hardly ever went “home” at all. Guana santo, man!

Remember, I was down in Houston living the hellhouse - ruled by an hourly cycle of shouting fights despite counseling and over God knows what while Mom was going for shock treatments and then the brain tumor. Back then I was hoping they’d divorce and I could move in with Dad. (Dad may have had his issues, but at least he seemed reasonable to me, and I now understand how he got so frustrated when I couldn’t grok his attempts to tutor me in Algebra II).

I got into bike riding back then as a means of staying detached from the madness at home. B____ stayed home and cried a lot. M____ practiced her saxophone and we both spent as much time at school as we could. Band, we called it. B____, not so lucky. He stuck around stuffing his face with chips while attempting to drown out the madness with a television set.

I had literally no idea. Dear God in heaven.

* Oh yes, the song. It’s the first one I’ve written in years, and the rest of the lyrics will fall into place shortly. This is all I have so far, but it sounds great accompanied by my resophonic bouzouki in Appalachian death-stomp mode. In a few days, I hope to have a recording posted here, so keep your eyes and ears open. In the meantime, here’s what I have so far. The title of this piece is [ahem], “Mother Don’t Kill Me,” and it’s a sure-fire hit in hell:

Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Well I came ‘cause you said you were dyin’
I came ‘cause my siblings were scared
but the nightmare I found down in Tucson
was worse than I ever had dared

So Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Then I’d take you on back to Kent County
put you down in the ground next to Dad
there’d me no more abusin’ and fightin’
be the best time that I ever had

Transmutation, chilluns!

I think it’s always been there, though rarely mentioned, this cold, black thing that kills all love and joy. Always! Though in my memory the first remembered taste of it came in Abilene, Texas when I was barely 13 years old.

This would be during the early years of rock & roll, 1958, when Buddy Holly was still alive. I single him out because we lived close to Lubbock, his home town, and to everyone in Abilene, Buddy was still a local hero. His music had a huge impact on me, because after Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, and Fats Domino, listening to Buddy Holly was like listening to a slightly older version of myself. Rock & roll in general was the total antidote to every restrictive guilty pain I’d ever felt when growing up, the sheer joy a healing balm. I grasped the music with both hands and a willing heart, even though from inside my family (and elsewhere) came the darkly-hinted sense that something was “wrong” about letting go and feeling good.

For now this reference is a footnote, one I’ll expand later. In the context of the Helen Chronicles and my immersion into unholy hell in Tucson, it’s important, though: I remember where the ugly started… and it’s been going on for quite a while. Toward the end of my rolling nervous breakdown in Tucson, I happened to email my favorite cousin, almost exactly the same age as I am, with the observation that I thought Helen had probably been mentally ill for her whole life. Her reply was startling:

Absolutely true! I thought you already knew that she had this problem. I remember my parents speaking about an incident or two that happened when your family was visiting Granny. I guess she was never medicated/treated for it?

So everyone else knew except for her own children? If you don’t think this is monumental — and liberating — for a 63-year-old man to absorb, you haven’t been paying attention. Helen does have dementia, but I doubt it’s Alzheimer’s. Even if it is, there’s something else that’s in the mix, and it’s always been there: I remembered the first time my sister T_______ and I visited my folks in Tucson, back in ‘76. It was a Christmas visit, and while opening our presents there was such a horrible outpouring of hate from Helen that my sister and I immediately fled, driving up to the top of Mt. Lemmon outside of Tucson to sit on a rock, smoke dope, and watch the buzzards ride the thermals. Merry Xmas, y’all…

Oh my God

The truth is, I was completely possessed in Tucson. The pressure was unbearable. I couldn’t speak a single sentence without crying. My rage was all-encompassing, too. On the worst day of all, near the end, I cursed out both my brothers and a commenter on this site who’s very much like a brother. That was the day I initiated guardianship proceedings against Helen, so that I could force her into some kind of protective situation for her own good. A nursing home, assisted living, an asylum, who knows? The lawyers agreed that I had an emergency on my hands and had to act. Seven hundred fifty dollars later, phone calls had been made, appointments scheduled. I had a social worker visit Helen for a preliminary interview, and that’s where things began to look unsteady.

According to the social worker, Helen “presented well.” So much for social science, eh? I wonder what Helen was actually asked. Not about the voices, certainly, or the fact that she’d already forgotten that she’d asked me to come to Tucson to have her cremated and sell the properties! (She was dying, remember.) But this was a definite yellow flag as far as an emergency court hearing to obtain guardianship was concerned. Usually such proceedings aren’t undertaken unless there isn’t any doubt, and once again, the authorities were throwing up a roadblock. If I proceeded with the legal action, there would be a fight, and I would end up testifying in court against my mother. Naturally, I balked.

The next thing was that I finally included a younger brother in the deliberations, and he had reservations, too. I could see this wasn’t going to work, even though the alternative was the previously unthinkable one of just leaving Helen be. Leave her there in a rotten, sharp-edged, dirty, dingy trailer with no railing on the outside kitchen steps, no way to wash her soiled linens, no place to store her things. Leave her there in stinking, humid, white-hot Arizona with only one sibling and the cleaning lady to visit her. Leave her like she said she wanted to be left, losing checkbooks, missing $2500 cash, buying trailers she didn’t need with money set aside for taking care of her. Leave her with the voices talking about her in the night, needing dentures, glasses, and good food in the cupboard. Just leave her, like the laws of Arizona say she had a right to be, left alone to live like a crazy, sick, old lady who had no friends and no one to look after her. Just leave her there and go away… If that’s the way she wanted it, crazy or not, then…

Refusing all assistance

But all at once I felt a little loosening, a glimmer of hope for me. That morning I also had a long-distance talk with a Jungian analyst I’ve known for several years. She talked about the “dark, wild thing” that I had taken on myself by coming to Tucson and was clearly worried for my own safety. We both saw then that if I continued with the legal action, the dark, wild thing would still be on my shoulders. I knew I had to drop everything and leave.

Immediately thereafter, I called the lawyers and killed the process. (They agreed!) I told my siblings I was going home. I gathered up the checkbooks and credit cards I’d taken from Helen’s trailer and prepared to take them back to her. Already I felt like I was released from prison, even though I had the major hurdle of confronting Helen to apologize and comfort her.

Alas, my good intentions did not come to pass. What happened next requires another chapter, in fact, the most unbelievable of all. (Part V, coming up…)

Who did this, and how did this happen?

The dynamic is this: Helen is too sick to realize she can’t take care of herself and refuses to go to a nursing home — in this circumstance, however, every authority supports her instead of me. it’s as if you take your dearest loved one bleeding to a hospital and the security guards immediately start beating YOU with their nightsticks. I would say more, but a vital process is in motion. The fact is that no one can legally force another, not even a sick old woman, to accept care. As unbelievable as that sounds, it’s absolutely true. You can’t make them go to a nursing home or anywhere else, especially not her.

For the record, I was with her when she shit her pants in public, and she regularly pisses the bed. She moved into a dump, lost $2,500 in cash she had withdrawn, can’t really cook, can’t take a real bath, left most of her makeup and jewelry at the old house, needs new dentures and eyeglasses, and can’t walk farther than a few yards without resting. That didn’t stop her from cursing me and yelling for the police outside the doctor’s office this a.m. while trying to hit me with her cane.

You would think the above is evidence enough to get help for her, but you would be wrong. Not if she doesn’t want it. I broke down in the doctor’s office this morning because the doctor refused to do anything except recommend family counseling, and then she said: “I think YOU’RE a danger to your mother!”

Subsequently, I learned that the doctor had alerted Adult Protective Services about me! As I had an appointment with the lawyer I absolutely needed to keep, I packed all my clothes and things into the rental car and got the hell out of the house so no one could find and detain me. My attorney told me later that if APS did come around, they’d only ask questions first. But of course, I couldn’t have known that…

Her eyes turn black when she’s raving: small, shiny black eyes with a frightened fox-in-a-snare look. It’s like something is trying to escape, as if her soul is trying to leave her body but can’t get all the way out. I was able to talk to her about this, believe it or not, assuring her she wasn’t crazy but “different.” I told her that I wanted her to come to Taos with me (to a nursing home, of course), where I could visit her every day. She won’t come, though. She wants to stay in the grave of her dingy dead man’s trailer.

There are other solutions than nursing homes, but she would still have to agree, and there is no one to manage her care in Tucson unless I leave her in the hands of strangers — and she would have to agree, which she will not do. After this morning’s horror show in the doctor’s office, I’m not seeing her for a while. Who wants to talk to the police?

I will do what I can, EVERYTHING I can, and as completely as I can. I will follow through. I love her still, no matter what, even though she rejects me in her sickness, and I will not let her die alone if I can help it.